SunWL

White light Sun Gallery

Mosaic of a large group of sun spots

Sunday, june 17, 2001 12H36 UT
Vesta pro, red filter R25 at C8 primary focus
3 selected images processed with PSP6

New

An old dream comes true :

(Thanks to Danny ... for his wonderful acaptators !)

The whole Sun on TouUCam Pro CCD
29 Avril 2001, 09H37 UT
Perl Halley 70

Processing :

This whole sun image was obtained after registration with Iris of 8 images selected from the avi with Aviedit,

with the following method :
File/BMP Conversion in FIT sr, sv (sb was neglected as quasi zero)
Pregister of each group
file_trans of the non register files of each group
add2 of each group
saving in FIT
trichro r v b

Unsharp mask in PSP, 2 150

Below is a raw image

To see how thoses images have been done using special adaptors from Danny Loudèche,
have a look at the french illustrated page adaptation !

Mai 8, 2001, 11h14 UT
At last clear skies ... then some serious work can be done !
Perl Halley 70 with 2 Celestron reductors and IRB filter (only the whole Sun)

In this composit picture, the Sun image results from combining 50 unselected frames from an AVI
with Iris in the same conditions as above.
The thumbnails of the 3 main sun spots are from the C8 at primary focus with the Vesta Pro.
Orientation was done by pushing the AD motor to find the East direction during the AVI.
Then a ligne was drawn between the extreme positions of the same sun spot
on a composite of 2 images placed exactly side by side.

At least 2 min of happiness !!
An "incredibly" large piece of blue sky has given me the occasion to realise a 2 min AVI ... without clouds !

The result is the post below !

Whole Sun and sunspot details

17 mai 2001 16H13 UT (late afternoon then high turbulence)

PerlHalley 70, full aperture glass solar filter, 2 C8 reductors, IRB filter
ToUcam Pro, manual mode, 1/1000s, gain mini, gamma &luminosity median, 5ima/sec, manual coulors

Upper left, 360 unselected images from the Avi
(note : the selection of 34 best images gave less nice results) combined but untreated with Avi2bmp, border 5

Lower left, processed image ("sharpen more" 2x) in PSP,

On the right, suspots details at the primary focus of the C8 with Vesta Pro no IRB
(individual images selected from Avi)

The visible granulation of the processed whole Sun image is now real !
It is no more the always present TUC noise seen on individual images.
Summing 360 images has killed it !

***

New !

Animation with 2 images in less than 24h !

20010610 0803 Sun PH2Red IRB KSt491.bmp

20010611 0641 Sun PH2Red IRB TUC KSt324.bmp

Solar Animation from 2001 May 16 to 31
(one composited image per day, détails see readme)

Here just a tiny example of what you will download !

Note : The original avi file weigths 10Mo ! Not worth to put it in line !
Then you can upload a 200Ko Divx file of good quality)
install the Divx video codec for Win9x
and read it with Mplayer2 or Aviedit...
click on the image to start animation !
See the rotation of the Sun and the transformation of individual sunspots !!

Below still image of May 24 (only 5 min of clear sky in late afternoon !!)

20010524 1751 UT PH 2red IRB TUC KSt422.jpg

***

Pulnix video camera , 8mm diag CCD
IRcut + red 25 + green filter 58
Celestron 8 at FD=4 (2 reductors)
4 images mosaic done with Iris (C. Buil)
(light unsharp mask)

Principal sunspot group of above image
Celestron 8, FD=10
Greyscale Quickcam, IR cut filter

Left, problematic manual registering of 33 images (20000304, average turbulence, automatic registering gave awful results), right automatic registering of 7 images with Iris (20000306, low turbulence). Unsharp mask, high contrast. It is obvious that combining images is worth only when images have been taken under low air turbulence ! Compare with individual images below.

Sun spots visible with the "protected" eye
Celestron 8 at prime focus, FD=10
Camera Quickcam N&B, IR cut filter
March 6, 2000, from around 10H UT
2500 images taken automatically at 1 sec d'interval
6 selected single images, unsharp mask
Tnnn indicate time in sec after T0 (first image taken)
As same very fine penumbral structures are observed at different times,
they are real and not caused by image processing or air turbulence.

Trial image processing for a large sunspot

Sun spot visible with the "protected" eye
Celestron 8, Barlow 3x Televue, FD=30
Camera Quickcam Pro, IR cut filter
March 12, 2000, 12H19 UT

Legends :
Top left, unprocessed selected image from .avi, converted from .BMP to FIT
Top right, final processed image
Processing details (complete panel was to large to be displayed)
1) Part of original image 2) Corresponding flat field made on blue sky without sun filter
3) image divided by flat (black points - dust on CCD - still there) with x230 then
4) second division by flat gives white spots. I did find it better - less confusion possible with sunspot structure
5) Unsharp mask in Iris with parameters 3, 3, P, image save to .bmp
6) Soften filter in PSP5
Unsharp mask with parameters 3, 100 in PSP5 gives final image.

Sun spot visible with the "protected" eye
Celestron 8, Barlow 3x Televue, FD=30
Camera Quickcam Pro, IR cut filter
March 13, 2000, 13H10 UT

Size of Earth at same scale :

Image Processing :
3 selected images superposed in PSP5 via transparent layers
resize 200%, unsharp mask 6/500, soften,resize 50%, umask 1/500

Sunspots visible with the "protected" eye
Avril 24, 2000, 12H13 UT

greyscale : Celestron 8, FD=10, Quickcam Pro, no IRcut filter
color : Samsung Video camera 8mm + EIS

Image processing :
Digitalisation : Snappy, Resized 50%, PSP5
unsharp mask 1/500

As you are interested in the Sun don't miss :

http://www.digilife.be/club/franky.dubois/

Permission granted to copy them for non commercial use